Let us cowboy up, my Princesses
There was an article in Wired last month about why athletes choke under pressure.
Feh. Sports. I didn’t get that gene. But buried in the middle of it was a really interesting concept sports psychologists call stereotype threat.
It was first noticed when two Stanford psych profs were able to knock down black Stanford undergrads’ GRE scores fifty percent, just by telling them it was an IQ test. Lest you think that’s one of those lefty bullshit stats aimed at Certain Populations, it’s been tested many times since and it works for everybody. You can psych out women before a math test by reminding them they’re women. You can screw up white men before a math test by telling them they’ll be compared to Asians.
…in 1999, Jeff Stone, a social psychologist at the University of Arizona, asked both white and black golfers to play a putting game framed as a test of either “sports intelligence” or “natural athletic ability.” The results still astonish: Among the golfers considering the putting game a test of “natural athletic ability,” blacks did better than usual and whites did worse. Among those framing it as a sort of sports intelligence test, whites did better and blacks worse.
Basically, we’ve all internalized the stereotypes, and other people can psych the HELL out of us with them.
This whole whoregate thing made me think of this — one of Jerry Brown’s associates (looks like his wife, maybe) called his opponent, Meg Whitman, a whore.
Oh. Dear. A lewd, woman-specific insult aimed at a woman.
Why, this is…a…a…a perfectly ordinary game of hardball, ladies. This is the kind of ugly trash talk that is entirely unexceptional.
And yes, I know it’s not nice and I know it’s not fun (my email can occasionaly be unfun; I can’t imagine how Michelle Malkin takes hers in stride) — and it sure as hell isn’t an approach I’d be comfy taking — but it’s no big. We demean ourselves by pretending otherwise.
We aren’t getting womany insults because we’re women; we’re getting whatever insults they think will get under our skin and screw up our game, because we’re playing with the big boys. And some of them don’t play nice.
ADDENDUM: on the other hand, we should certainly make a big effing deal of this language whenever they use ugly stereotypes, on account of they pretend they don’t. As Alinsky sez:
Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
October 11, 2010 — 11:41 pm
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